Specific Leader Attributes that will help in Teaching Family Education

Specific Leader Attributes that will help in Teaching Family Education

1. Widening our perspective: Most of us don’t realize we have a natural blind spot when it comes to how other families deal with mental illness. Because our own trauma so vividly floods our lives, we develop a highly personalized view of what mental illness is and what should be done about it. This blind spot actually obstructs our understanding of others. Our own “single-case study” doesn’t prepare us for the enormous range of experience families have in these illnesses. To communicate effectively with families, we need to be aware of our tendency to generalize from our own specifics. Recognizing this limitation will help us listen without judgment, to question our certainties and preconceptions, and to acquire genuine empathy for a wide variety of individual and family responses to mental illness.

2. The willingness to self disclose: We might well ask how and when we use our own experience, pain and hard-won wisdom? We use it by expressing our emotions freely when they are relevant to the feelings in the group. The one single element that unites us as families is our emotional experience of devastating loss. Regretfully, it is this universal aspect of grief and disconsolation in families that professionals and healthcare providers cannot seem to grasp.

In many cases, families new to mental illness, or those whose grief has been stifled by a world of reproaches and self-doubt, will not know that they have a right to ventilate negative feelings. They are also not likely to do so unless you show them the way – by being real about the toughest emotional aspects of living with mental illness in the family. To the degree that you can treat your own emotions with the respect they deserve (no, they are not terrible, or funny, or weird), you will be communicating a healing message of compassion and self-care.

3. Be careful about giving advice: Because we never really know the “inside story” of another family’s experience, exercise caution around giving advice that sounds too prescriptive – particularly around issues of confronting ill family members or “re-setting” family limits around difficult behaviors. All advice should be tempered with a disclaimer. For example, “this is what worked for me in my situation”. This way you have qualified a suggestion and family members in your classes are free to try it – or not.

4. Caring about the empowerment of others: One way we signal respect for other families is in the way we work in the group. We are peers and consultants; we are open-hearted and warm; we want everyone to know as much as we do by the end of the course. Co-leaders need to work out how they will divide the teaching load to communicate equality, sharing and mutual respect. We know that families coping with mental illness have been robbed of dignity and self-esteem. We remember that families long for recognition and appreciation of their efforts. We must include new families in the wonderfully healing activities of leadership, teaching, speaking and advocacy. Empowerment means letting others in on all the good stuff. Nothing is more restorative for a family member than to appear normal and competent in a public forum.

5. A special word for family member professionals teaching the course:

It is very important if you are a family member mental health professional serving as a co-leader to approach the teaching task in the primary role of family member. This means you will need to “park” your professional hat outside the door before each class, and make a conscious effort to enter into each week’s activities as a peer member of the group. Your special training can certainly enrich the proceedings, but you must watch the tendency of families to treat you as the “resident expert” and thereby demote your co-leader to a secondary role. So, don’t propound, elaborate extensively on the text, answer all questions, discuss agency policy, etc.

This word to the wise also applies to all co-leaders whose charisma, gift-of gab and performance needs are a large part of their joy in presentation. The golden rule to remember is this: the families taking the course are not there for us: We are there for them.

6. A special word for family member consumers teaching the course:

We know it is more difficult to “park” a consumer hat outside the door, but do your best. Your lived experience of mental illness will add immeasurably to people’s understanding of brain disorders. However, try to give equal or greater voice to your concerns as a family member. Families tend to defer to consumers in a group, and if you stay in your consumer role, you run the same risk of a family member professional of demoting your co-leader.